Minimum Bounding Rectangle

Synonyms

MBR; Minimum orthogonal bounding rectangle; MOBR

Definition

A minimum bounding rectangle is used to approximate a more complex shape. It is a rectangle whose sides are parallel to the x and y axises and minimally enclose the more complex shape.

Main Text

Spatial objects can take a significant amount of memory to represent. For example, a polygon which represents the borders of a country could have tens of thousands of vertices. A polyline which represents a complex linear feature such as a river would also have many vertices. Doing geometric operations such as finding objects which overlap such a complex object would be very computationally expensive, since the location of every vertex would have to be considered. There are times when we only need to know the approximate geometrical features of an object, such as during the filter step of a filter and refine strategy. In these cases, the minimum bounding rectangle (MBR) is used to approximate the shape in a simpler manner. The...